The Cogenitor
- Thread starter Tracy Trek
- Start date
A laser beam needs to be focused in order to be efficient.Well, it ain't me. TBBS is the only board I'm on.
And..."taking the piss for ya"?
We don't have to agree with the conclusions either Archer or Trip draw. Nobody is standing on a soapbox saying, "Do what they did because they're morally holier-than-thou." We make choices; some are the right ones for now, some are right for the future; some are wrong now, some are wrong in the long term.
Ideally, we should be able to understand that I believe what I do and you believe what you do, without coming to blows. But so much of what we believe demands action which directly contradicts what the other is trying to do.
I realize that episode writers usually have a message to send; whether it's "This is what ought to be done/will happen if we continue/is being done and is great" or "This is what should never happen/may happen if we don't stop it/is happening and it's horrible" depends on the writer. Don't assume that just because a story ends a certain way, it means that we should do as they did.
This episode only shows how much of an asshole Archer actually is. It was already stupid of him not to realize how dreadful the life of the cogenitor was but when she killed herself it should have told him that he had been wrong to send her back to begin with. Instead he completely ignored his responsibility in the matter and decided to go off on trip who was the only one to act humanly in this episode.
That wouldn't have been worse than what he did to other people.
Are there real species of animals that reproduce like these people did?
Why is that relevant?
^Just curious where the episode's idea came from.
Well, as someone said in the thread, a third gender doesn't make much sense in an evolutionary stand point. It doesn't add much in the way of mixing the DNA of the species but complicate matters needlessly. I mean you have to find three people at the same time willing to do the deed instead of two and the number of non reproductive combinations with three is staggering, so you have 27 possible arrangements of three people with three genders and only one that can produce children. In comparison you have only four with two and two genders and half of them produce children. A species like that would be constantly on the brink of extinction assuming it can even exist to begin with..
There was a very similar idea in the series "Alien Nation." A couple required a third party to become pregnant, like a catalist. The "third sex" were typically mentally deficiant, a were something like 1% of the population.
They occupided a respected position in the alien community.
They occupided a respected position in the alien community.
I do wonder what the repercussions would have been if the Enterprise crew took it upon themselves to rescue every alien stuck in a horrible situation.
If Kirk holds the record for temporal violations, Archer and co. would hold the record for wars started.
The point is that the Prime Directive would likely lead to some unpleasant choices, and some regrettable decisions that would haunt the mind of those who made them for the rest of their life.
But the alternative is to impose your personal feelings and cultural mores on everyone, whether such would be beneficial to them or their culture or not.
But the alternative is to impose your personal feelings and cultural mores on everyone, whether such would be beneficial to them or their culture or not.
The thing is that the prime directive as it is presented doesn't work. Kirk in STID is right. Who cares if they saw the Enterprise flying in the air, they just saved them from oblivion! But they would have you believe that quibbling over the "they saw your ship" makes sense. Well, it doesn't.
In a perfect universe, you could pause and do a cost-benefit analysis, or come up with a better way of doing it. But then, you wouldn't need to intervene in the first place if it was perfect.
I do pity those people who now have to scramble a post-first contact team together to mitigate the damage every time a captain jumps in and thinks with his heart. It's a tough job. But I don't pity them enough to agree that "observe and report without helping" is always the best idea.
I do pity those people who now have to scramble a post-first contact team together to mitigate the damage every time a captain jumps in and thinks with his heart. It's a tough job. But I don't pity them enough to agree that "observe and report without helping" is always the best idea.
Perhaps, but at what point does "playing God" lead to irrevocable damage? TOS presented several examples where an individual from an "advanced" civilization had caused immense damage to a society or species.
The idea that everyone will be benevolent and CORRECT in their interference is ludicrous.
Do you know how oral cultures work? In about three or four generations they will have forgotten pretty much everything accurate about the ship. all that will be left will be the kind of stuff that they make up in order to feed their own mythos whether they are based on true events or not.
And those that are can have unexpected, unintended consequences.
So why aren't there people from the future (Temporal agents and the like) stepping aboard Kirk's ship in every episode and going, "No you don't! This will lead to interstellar war in 50 years!"?
So why aren't there people from the future (Temporal agents and the like) stepping aboard Kirk's ship in every episode and going, "No you don't! This will lead to interstellar war in 50 years!"?
